And remembering the outdated foods of the 70's and 80's - fashionable, Perrier as the sparkling water, Vichyssoise, Gazpacho, Cold Strawberry and Cucumber soup, escargot, bowls of steamed mussels, and my thoughts turn to the foods I was raised on...
...Mom - curried chicken livers, too much curry, peaches and pork chops (I liked this one...), Dad, spaghetti loaf, by which I mean a loaf of spaghetti hard-boiled into a solid mass and then covered in meat sauce, I didn't realize pasta was supposed to be individual noodles, thought of it instead as a big uniform lump...
and remember hating the food because of the enormous amount of dishes it would create, this, of course, dates me, from the days when children were expected to help out with family chores, "The Olden Days" as I tell my children...
But by far the worst were the Jellied salads. Family reunions and get-togethers, shimmering, glistening jeweled domes shaped in cheap Tupperware, filled with things like shredded celery and carrots, or lemon zest, nuts, bell peppers, ...the grossest of deceits, to look upon them, spread out upon a picnic table, was to imagine tasty treasures that clearly did not exist, in appearance, cool and delicious, in reality, bitter, contrasting textures, disgusting, every one, trying a bit of each color of the rainbow only to discover they were all inedible, worse than inedible, every ingredient on it's own fine, who doesn't like carrots, celery, nuts, jello, but the combination, preserved like bugs in amber, pink, lime green, ruby red gelatins - well, there are things my kids have never had to endure, this early preparation for life's frauds and treachery is one of them... like somehow dolling up the gelatin that pools on the bottom of a tin of meat and making it edible, pretending that it's delicious...
That said, there was one, if you survived the "healthy salads" - the marshmallow/whipping cream/fruit cup with maraschino cherries, that I quite enjoyed, but given the options I'm pretty sure I would have enjoyed crickets or grasshoppers as well...
Which makes me think, I mean, it probably was just me, everyone made at least one, brought it to the pot-luck, clearly they enjoyed them, and maybe there would be a market for a restaurant that specialized in this ...